About the speakers
Carolyn Stransky is an American journalist and JavaScript developer based in Berlin. She’s currently working as a technical writer at Contentful and teaching front end development in the evenings at ReDI School. You can follow her on Twitter @carolstran (https://twitter.com/carolstran)
Anna Melzer is a computational linguist and web developer from Berlin. She likes looking for rules and patterns in the world around her, trying to connect language, life and music. Her interests include games, tango and grammatical idiosyncrasies.

Talk descriptions

The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants
In this talk Anna will introduce the attendees to the concept of formal grammars by looking at sentence structure of natural (human) language and building a bridge to Lindenmeyer Systems used to describe plant growth.
Self care: A primer on work-life balance
Let’s face it, lack of self care is a problem in the tech industry. We wear exhaustion like a badge of honor, promote unrealistic expectations about loyalty and often times we neglect our body, heart and mind’s most basic needs. In this talk, we’ll cover the scope of this issue—including the misconceptions around what self care actually is—and learn how you can build your own self care toolkit.